Jason Fried first cut his teeth as an entrepreneur-in-training at age 14, buying items from magazines and selling them to friends at double the price. At the time, he thought “this is easy, I can do this.”
Now Fried is the co-founder of successful Chicago-based software company 37 Signals, where he is in charge of about 30 employees based all over the country. And his thinking still holds true today.
“I believe everything is simple and easy,” he said. “Until you make it complicated.”
Fried joined the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce Wednesday morning for an onstage interview and dialogue, where he answered questions about his work philosophy and explained that by keeping things simple, we can be more productive.
Kim Taylor, President of Healthcare Language Services, conducted the interview, involving audience members and eliciting one thought-provoking response after the next. As Fried grew up in suburban Chicago, he was able to relate to the audience.
“Chicago is a great place to run a business, especially a tech business,” he said. “Some people think you should go out to the west coast for that, but people here really like to build a sustainable business.”
Fried has done things his own way for most of his life, and learned early in his career that he would be unable to work for anyone else. His day-to-day approach to life has translated to success in the business world.
“I’m not really a big planner,” he said. “I have core principles and beliefs that guide me. I just don’t think about 50 years from now, I want my business to be this or that.”
Throughout most of his work experiences early in life, he could not understand why people always tended to make things more complicated than they had to be. He learned early on that what sounds good in theory doesn’t always work well in practice.
“A lot of lessons I’ve learned along the way are that people always want to out-do the competition, do more than they do,” he said. “I try to under-do the competition.”
When discussing the application of his philosophy, he repeatedly cautioned the audience to avoid starting with huge projects or big ideas. His advice was to start with a smaller side project, and cut the initial amount of work in half. This helps because it is simpler and there’s less at stake.
“You can have a big idea, but it’s usually made up of a bunch of smaller ideas, so you want to break it down,” he said. “The next big thing you’re working on – if it’s made up of ten things, cut it down to nine. Or less. There’s so many things you think you have to do that you just don’t.”
As expected from an intellect like Fried, he stressed the idea that we need to make time to simply think. In the hustle and bustle of most workplace environments, some people are so busy that they don’t have time to sit back and reflect.
“Not only do you have to schedule a few hours here or there to think, you have to respect others’ rights to do the same thing, without interruptions,” he said.
In a display of generosity, Fried gave away several signed copies of his book “Rework” and took the dialogue from the stage to the floor as he chatted with attendees.
